Suffice it to say, for our purposes here, that Snowden’s activities are–quite obviously–an intelligence operation directed at Barack Obama’s administration at one level and the United States and U.K. at another.

We note that the individuals and institutions involved with Snowden, as well as Fast Eddie himself, track back to the far right, Nazi, white supremacists, Holocaust deniers and elements and individuals involved with the Underground Reich. Again, PLEASE examine the previous posts on the subject, as there is no way to flesh out this line of inquiry in this post.

We will be posting a summary analysis of Fast Eddie’s “op” to aid with sorting out and clarifying this long, complicated and tortuous presentation.

In this post, we update the gathering domestic fascist phalanx mustering on behalf of Eddie the Friendly Spook and, in turn, positioning to hand the 2014 and 2016 elections to the Nazified GOP. Expect to see L’Affaire Snowden play into the Republican theme of Obama/Democrats as sponsors of “big government” etc., etc.

Although a congressional coalition of so-called progressives and right-wingers is gathering to take measures to “rein-in” NSA vacuum cleaning operations, the genesis, substance and intent of this “op” is undeniably and completely fascist.

It is only too typical of the so-called “progressive” sector to ally themselves with those who intend their destruction. We will discuss this more in our summary analysis of this operation.

NOTE: Palantir officially claims that “their PRISM” is NOT the same PRISM in the focal point of the Snowden/NSA imbroglio. We feel this claim is laughable, frankly. The notion that the intelligence services are using TWO counter-terror software programs with identical names is not credible. Had a company developed a counter-terror software program for use by the intelligence community and called it “PRISM,” there would have been litigation. The major tech companies are NOTHING if not litigious, and Thiel and company have PLENTY of money!

Recently, Snowden’s father Lon has joined the fray, joining forces with elements associated with both Ron Paul and his son, Rand–a bird of the same feather as his Nazi father.

The political front taking shape against Obama at one level, and U.S. internet and media business at another, is inextricably linked with the Nazi/fascist milieu of Ron Paul. Consider the following:

Ron Paul’s son Rand Paul is leading the political charge over the Snowden “disclosures” (note the quotes.) Rand Paul is lining up as a GOP Presidential hopeful for 2016, looking to capitalize on libertarian populism as a vehicle for achieving victory. Again, expect to see L’Affaire Snowden play into the Republican theme of Obama/Democrats as sponsors of “big government” etc., etc. (Both the above-mentioned Peter Thiel and Glenn Greenwald–Snowden’s leaking journalist of choice–network with the Koch brothers funded Cato Institute, an epicenter of libertarian ideology.) (See text excerpts below.)

We have noted in past discussion that one of the goals of this “op” is to alienate younger, more idealistic voters from the Democratic party. That appears to be one of Rand Paul’s stratagems in his campaign bid. (See text excerpts below.)

Rand Paul’s key staffer Jack Hunter is a former chairmanof The League of the South, a racist neo-Confederate organization that advocates the secession of the South and has links to the milieu behind the assassination of Martin Luther King. Sarah Palin’s political milieu also has links to the League of the South. (See text excerpts below.)

Fein also networked with the German-based Schiller Institute, run by the fascist organization of Lyndon LaRouche. (See text excerpts below.)

Fein also works on behalf of Turkish interests, acting in conjunction with forces alleged by Sibel Edmonds to be involved with money laundering on behalf of interests that include Al-Qaeda. The probability is strong that Fein operates in conjunction with the Erdogan government and–possibly–Fetullah Gulen. (See text excerpts below.)

In an update, we note that Ron Paul will be attending a fund-raiser for a fascist splinter sect of Catholicism that endorses Holocaust denial, claims the Jews are trying to exterminate Gentiles and denies that the earth revolves around the sun. Paul’s association with this group goes back to 1998. (See text excerpts below.)

EXCERPT: The father of the National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden says his son has been so vilified by the Obama administration and members of Congress that he is now better off staying in Russia.

Lon Snowden had been working behind the scenes with lawyers to try to find a way his son could get a fair trial in the US. Edward Snowden has been charged in federal court with violating the Espionage Act by leaking details of NSA surveillance. . . .

. . . . Lon Snowden and his lawyer, Bruce Fein, released a letter on Friday asking Obama to dismiss the criminal charges against Edward Snowden and to support legislation “to remedy the NSA surveillance abuses he revealed”. . . .

. . . . Lon Snow­den and Fein are start­ing a non­profit group called the Defense of the Con­sti­tu­tion Foun­da­tion to pro­mote the issues his son has raised. . . .

EXCERPT: In a curious development, NSA traitor Edward Snowden’s father is being represented by attorney Bruce Fein, who appeared with Senator Rand Paul at his anti-NSA news conference on June 13. Fein says “someone in Senator [Rand] Paul’s office” recommended him to Edward Snowden’s father, Lonnie. . . .

. . . . .But his involvement in the Snowden case isn’t the only controversial aspect of Fein’s recent career moves. A well-respected constitutional lawyer whose books include American Empire: Before the Fall, Fein has appeared at two conferences this year sponsored by the Schiller Institute, a group started by political extremist and convicted felon Lyndon LaRouche. . . .

EXCERPT: Edward J. Snowden’s father and the family’s lawyer said Sunday that they had obtained visas to visit the former intelligence contractor in Russia and indicated that they would encourage him to return to the United States to face federal charges for revealing secret American surveillance programs to journalists, but only if acceptable trial conditions could be negotiated.

“What I would like,” said Lon Snowden, the father, “is for this to be vetted in open court, for the American people to have all the facts.” He said he favored his son’s return if a fair trial was assured. As for a possible plea deal, he said, “I’m not open to it, and that’s what I’ll share with my son.”

Appearing on the ABC News program “This Week,” Lon Snowden and the family’s lawyer, Bruce Fein, declined to say when they would visit, to avoid what Mr. Fein called a news media “frenzy,” but they said it would be soon.

In a criminal complaint filed in June, federal prosecutors charged Edward Snowden with theft, “unauthorized communication of national defense information” and willfully disclosing classified communications intelligence “to an unauthorized person.” The second and third charge were brought under the Espionage Act of 1917.

“We intend to visit with Edward and suggest criminal defense attorneys who’ve got experience in Espionage Act prosecutions,” said Mr. Fein, a well-known Washington lawyer who specializes in constitutional and international law. Such lawyers, he added, are uncommon, since prosecutions under the Espionage Act have been rare historically.

Mr. Fein noted that he has laid out his concerns about a potential trial, including its venue, in a letter to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., but he insisted that the terms he discussed were not “ultimatums” but rather negotiating points. . . .

EXCERPT: Last week, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul said, “I think as we have a fuller debate on these discussions you’re going to find that not only Republicans are with me on this issue, the youth are.” As a former Young Americans for Liberty Chairman for the State of Florida, I know that Rand Paul is 100% correct.

The youth in this country have an appreciation for privacy, especially Internet privacy, which the “national security over privacy” advocates don’t seem to understand. Young people are skeptics as to just how much safer going through our Internet searches of cats in funny hats and our Instagram pictures of food are making us. In a generation where everything is shared, young people certainly do not want the NSA reading their posts critical of ObamaCare and arming the Syrian “rebels.”

In a recent CNN/ORC International Poll, 61% of respondents said they disapprove of the way Barack Obama is handling government surveillance of U.S. citizens (only 52% disapproved of President Bush in 2006, for comparison). If the poll had broken down into age groups, it’s likely the youth would have responded most negatively. . . .

EXCERPT: Jack Hunter, a con­gres­sional aide to Sen. Rand Paul with a his­tory of “neo-Confederate” and “pro-secessionist” views, has pro­duced dozens of arti­cles and video com­men­taries for The Daily Caller and appeared as what one Fox Busi­ness host termed a “reg­u­lar” guest on that net­work. He also helped then-Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC), cur­rently the pres­i­dent of The Her­itage Foun­da­tion, write his most recent book.

The con­ser­v­a­tive Free Bea­con reported today that Hunter, a “close” Rand Paul aide who also co-wrote the Ken­tucky Republican’s 2011 book, “spent years work­ing as a pro-secessionist radio pun­dit and neo-Confederate activist … Hunter was a chair­man in the League of the South, which ‘advo­cates the seces­sion and sub­se­quent inde­pen­dence of the South­ern States from this forced union and the for­ma­tion of a South­ern republic.’” . . . .

EXCERPT: . . . . Hunter still main­tains a web­site, http://www.southernavenger.com, where he says he was the offi­cial blog­ger for the 2012 pres­i­den­tial cam­paign of for­mer Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, the father of the sen­a­tor from Kentucky. . . .

EXCERPT: . . . . . Fein has another company called Bruce Fein & Associates, located at 1025 Connecticut Avenue, N.W., Suite 1000. Washington, D.C.. 20036, which incidentally shares that address with the Turkish American Legal Defense Fund – TALDF, where Bruce Fein is the main contact. A bunch of similar astro-trurf groups – including the Turkish Coalition of America, TCA – share the same address. Bruce Fein is ‘resident scholar’ at the Turkish Coalition of America. Fein’s Huffington Post bio also notes that he was previously ‘resident scholar’ at ATAA. According to Sibel Edmonds, the ATAA conducts “the dirty activities” of the Turkey/Israeli lobby – including delivering bribes and other forms of blackmail to congressmen like Hastert, Roy Blunt, Tom Lantos, Dan Burton and others. Phil Giraldi similarly fingers ATAA here.

Fein’s Huffington Post bio also notes that he has been “a consultant to the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus.” Isn’t that odd. Just last month I noted that the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC) was at the heart of Sibel’s money laundering claims -and that the TRNC was also at the heart of money laundering operations for Central Asian dictators, terrorists like Osama Bin Laden, and “US government agencies,” “certain US government people,” “certain non-profit organizations in the US,” “certain US institutions including banking institutions,” and “certain US-based organizations.”

So, yeah, Bruce Fein is a ‘resident scholar’ at the Turkish Coalition of America, which, as Mizgin notes, “is closely linked to the Deep State and has created and founded an “academic” program to officially deny the Armenian genocide.” . . . .

EXCERPT: WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange gave a strong endorsement to the libertarian wing of the GOP on Thursday, praising Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and his father, former Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), for their political views.

“[I] am a big admirer of Ron Paul and Rand Paul for their very principled positions in the U.S. Congress on a number of issues,” Assange said during a forum hosted by Campus Reform and transparency organization OurSay.org. “They have been the strongest supporters of the fight against the U.S. attack on WikiLeaks and on me in the U.S. Congress.

Similarly, they have been the strongest opponents of drone warfare and extrajudicial executions.”
Assange went on to commend the libertarian ideal of “non-violence” with regards to military engagements, the draft and tax collection. He then put forth an argument against both established political parties in Washington, claiming that nearly all Democrats had been “co-opted” by President Barack Obama’s administration, while Republicans were almost entirely “in bed with the war industry.”

The current libertarian strain of political thought in the Republican Party was the “the only hope” for American electoral politics, Assange concluded. . . .

EXCERPT: In a heated Sep­tem­ber 5th inter­view with MSNBC’s Alex Wag­ner, For­mer U.S. Con­gress­man Ron Paul, who is cur­rently surf­ing a wave of main­stream media appear­ances due to his strong crit­i­cism of the push from the Obama Admin­is­tra­tion for U.S. mil­i­tary inter­ven­tion in Syria, defended his planned Sep­tem­ber 11th, 2013 keynote address at a “gala din­ner fundraiser” to be held dur­ing a con­tro­ver­sial [also see 1, 2] con­fer­ence orga­nized by a fringe, schis­matic Catholic orga­ni­za­tion accused of vir­u­lent anti-Semitism, the Fatima Center.

Accord­ing to a new report, Ron Paul’s asso­ci­a­tion with Fatima Cen­ter lead­ers, includ­ing Fatima Cen­ter head Father Nicholas Gruner — who has espoused Holo­caust denial, traces back at least as far as 1998.

Dur­ing the Sep­tem­ber 5th inter­view, MSNBC’s Wag­ner con­fronted Paul with the fact that the Fatima Cen­ter has been called a “hard-core anti-Semite group” and has in the past pub­lished writ­ing sug­gest­ing that Jews should be stripped of cer­tain civil rights — a sug­ges­tion also once made by one of the speak­ers, Father Paul Leonard Kramer, who will join Ron Paul at the upcom­ing Fatima Cen­ter “Path To Peace” con­fer­ence to be held Sep­tem­ber 8th to 13th in Nia­gara Falls, Ontario.

For­mer Con­gress­man Paul responded to MSNBC cor­re­spon­dent Wagner’s chal­lenge by flatly refus­ing to recon­sider his planned appear­ance at the Fatima Cen­ter con­fer­ence and by accus­ing Wag­ner of “Catholic bashing.”

Also join­ing For­mer Con­gress­man Ron Paul (R-TX) at the event will be speak­ers who have pro­moted Holo­caust denial and por­trayed global warm­ing as a hoax that will be used to jus­tify a Jew­ish and Israeli-led geno­cide of most of the Earth’s pop­u­la­tion, and who reject the long-established sci­en­tific fact that the Earth orbits the Sun.

Fatima Cen­ter head Father Nicholas Gruner, and other top lead­ers asso­ci­ated with the cen­ter, have for over two decades pro­moted claims that a global con­spir­acy of wealthy “apos­tate Jews” and Freema­sons — who are alleged to have financed Hitler and the Nazis and hold a “Hitler-like doc­trine of exter­mi­nat­ing the gen­tile races and repop­u­lat­ing the Earth with their own kind” — is plot­ting to insti­tute a “New World Order” global gov­ern­ment under the com­mand of the anti-Christ.

The South­ern Poverty Law Cen­ter, which tracks far-right, racist and anti-Semitic groups, iden­ti­fies the Fatima Cen­ter as part of the “‘rad­i­cal tra­di­tion­al­ist Catholic’ move­ment, [which is] per­haps the sin­gle largest group of hard-core anti-Semites in North America.” . . . .

Willis Carto is a holocaust denier, Hitler admirer and a white supremacist. A former campaigner for segregationist candidate George Wallace, Carto founded the National Alliance with William Pierce, the author of the “Turner Diaries,” which is credited for inspiring Timothy McVeigh. Carto founded the Populist Party in 1984 and ran David Duke as a presidential candidate. Carto also founded the American Free Press, which is labeled as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), where Paul’s column runs. Paul has not sued Carto for running his column or explained how it wound up in a white supremacist publication. The New York Times writes that Paul used the subscription list to a white supremacist publication of Carto’s to solicit donations. . . .. . . . 8. Don Black

Don Black is a former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, a current member of the American Nazi Party, and the owner and operator of the white supremacist site Stormfront. Black regularly organizes “money bombs” for Ron and Rand Paul and has even taken a picture with Ron Paul, who refused to return donations from Black and Stormfront even with the political tradition of not accepting donations from people who seem unfit. Black, who was sentenced to three years in jail for trying to overthrow the Caribbean country of Dominica in 1981, supports Paul through his Twitter account and on message boards for Stormfront.

Black told the New York Times that it was Paul’s newsletters that inspired him to be a supporter:
That was a big part of his constituency, the paleoconservatives who think there are race problems in this country.

7. Lew Rockwell
Lew Rockwell is a close friend and adviser of Paul’s who served as his congressional chief of staff between 1978 and 1982, worked as a paid consultant for Paul for more than 20 years, and was an editor and alleged ghost writer for his racist newsletters. Rockwell formed the Ludwig Von Mises Institute, which Paul still has a close working relationship with.

The Ludwig Von Mises Institute is listed by the SPLC as a neo-Confederate organization. They also add that Rockwell said that the Civil War “transformed the American regime from a federalist system based on freedom to a centralized state that circumscribed liberty in the name of public order” and that the Civil Rights Movement was the “involuntary servitude” of (presumably white) business owners. Rockwell was listed as one of the racist League of the South’s founding members but denies membership. Rockwell regularly posts articles on his website, attacking a New World Order conspiracy.

6. David Duke
David Duke is a former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan and candidate for Governor of Louisiana. Duke is also a New World Order conspiracy theorist who believes that Jews control the Federal Reserve. On his website, Duke proudly boasts about the endorsements and kind words that Paul gave him in his newsletters and in turn endorses Paul for president:

Duke’s platform called for tax cuts, no quotas, no affirmative action, no welfare, and no busing…
To many voters, this seems like just plain good sense. Duke carried baggage from his past, the voters were willing to overlook that. If he had been afforded the forgiveness an ex-communist gets, he might have won.

…David Broder, also of the Post and equally liberal, writing on an entirely different subject, had it right: ‘No one wants to talk about race publicly, but if you ask any campaign consultant or pollster privately, the sad reality that a great many working-class and middle class white Americans are far less hostile to the rich and their tax breaks than they are to the poor and minorities with their welfare and affirmative action programs.”

Liberals are notoriously blind to the sociological effects of their own programs. David Duke was hurt by his past. How many more Dukes are waiting in the wings without such a taint?

“Duke lost the election,” it said, “but he scared the blazes out of the Establishment.” In 1991, a newsletter asked, “Is David Duke’s new prominence, despite his losing the gubernatorial election, good for anti-big government forces?” The conclusion was that “our priority should be to take the anti-government, anti-tax, anti-crime, anti-welfare loafers, anti-race privilege, anti-foreign meddling message of Duke, and enclose it in a more consistent package of freedom.”

Duke also gave advice to Paul on his website, saying:

What must Paul do to have any real chance of winning or making a bigger impact? I think he should do exactly what I did in Louisiana, and for Ron Paul to follow exactly the same advice Ron Paul gave in his newsletters for others, take up my campaign issues with passion and purpose.

Could it be that Paul is taking Duke’s advice by hiding the racist “baggage from his past” in a more consistent package of “freedom?”

5. Thomas DiLorenzo
Thomas DiLorenzo is another neo-Confederate who believes the South was right in the the civil war and that Abraham Lincoln was a wicked man who destroyed states’ rights. DiLorenzo is listed as an affiliated scholar with the racist League of the South, which promotes segregation and a new southern secession. Paul invited DiLorenzo to testify before congress about the Federal Reserve and is close friends with Paul and works for the Ludwig Von Mises Instiute. Paul cited DiLorezno’s book when telling Tim Russert that the North should not have fought the Civil War.

4. James Von Brunn
James Von Brunn was a white supremacist and anti-Semite who opened fired at the Holocaust museum, killing an African-American security guard. Von Brunn was an avid Paul supporter who posted a message on the Ron Paul Yahoo Group, saying, “HITLER’S WORST MISTAKE: HE DIDN’T GAS THE JEWS.” In 1983, Von Brunn was convicted of kidnapping members of the Federal Reserve Board, a common target of Paul’s, and was sentenced to six years in prison.Von Brunn died while awaiting sentencing for his crime.

3. William Alexander “Bill” White
Bill White is a neo-Nazi who is a former member of of the neo-Nazi group the National Socialist Movement and founder of his own Nazi group, the National Socialist Worker’s Movement. He has called for the lynching of the Jena 6 and the assassination of NAACP leaders. White previously campaigned for Pat Buchanan and the Reform party. This year, White was convicted of threatening a juror but then freed by a judge who called the threats free speech. White is a former Ron Paul supporter who became disenfranchised with Paul, when a Paul spokesman called white supremacy “a small ideology.” Here is what White wrote about Paul on a popular white supremacist website:

I have kept quiet about the Ron Paul campaign for a while, because I didn’t see any need to say anything that would cause any trouble. However, reading the latest release from his campaign spokesman, I am compelled to tell the truth about Ron Paul’s extensive involvement in white nationalism.

Both Congressman Paul and his aides regularly meet with members of the Stormfront set, American Renaissance, the Institute for Historic Review, and others at the Tara Thai restaurant in Arlington, Virginia, usually on Wednesdays. This is part of a dinner that was originally organized by Pat Buchanan, Sam Francis and Joe Sobran, and has since been mostly taken over by the Council of Conservative Citizens.

I have attended these dinners, seen Paul and his aides there, and been invited to his offices in Washington to discuss policy.

For his spokesman to call white racialism a “small ideology” and claim white activists are “wasting their money” trying to influence Paul is ridiculous. Paul is a white nationalist of the Stormfront type who has always kept his racial views and his views about world Judaism quiet because of his political position.

I don’t know that it is necessarily good for Paul to “expose” this. However, he really is someone with extensive ties to white nationalism and for him to deny that in the belief he will be more respectable by denying it is outrageous – and I hate seeing people in the press who denounce racialism merely because they think it is not fashionable

Bill White, Commander
American National Socialist Workers Party

Ron Paul has not sued White for libel, which would be in his rights to do if White’s statement’s were lies. White is out of jail and has not lost credibility in the white supremacist world, writing for the neo-Nazi website the American Free Press and the same paper that used to carry Paul’s column.

EXCERPT: . . . . The Institute is critical of democracy, which authors in Mises Institute publications have called coercive,[22] incompatible with wealth creation,[23] replete with inner contradictions,[24] and a system of legalized graft. . . .

. . . . Institute scholars have condemned Abraham Lincoln’s conduct of the American Civil War (e.g. suspending habeas corpus), asserting that his policies contributed to the growth of statism in the United States. Senior faculty member Thomas DiLorenzo, in his critical biographies The Real Lincoln and Lincoln: Unmasked, argues that the sixteenth president substantially expanded the size and powers of the federal government at the expense of individual liberty. Adjunct faculty member Donald Livingston shares a similar view, blaming Lincoln for the creation of “a French Revolutionary style unitary state” and “centralizing totalitarianism.”[28]

LvMI’s Thomas DiLorenzo’s references to the American Civil War as the “War to prevent Southern Independence” and Mises faculty member Thomas Woods’s presence at the founding of the League of the South were cited by James Kirchick, writing for the New Republic, as suggesting a “disturbing attachment to the Confederacy.”[29] Woods has stated that he was present at the meeting at which the organization was founded,[30] and later contributed to its newsletter,[31] . . .

Discussion

We got another indication Snowden is going to play a big role in the rebranding of the GOP: The fight started this weekend between Chris Christie and Rand Paul – the two figures that are most likely to be seen as “the future” of the GOP – was partially a fight about all the response to the Snowden affair. As Bill Kristol put it, “I’m confident the Reagan Republicans will prevail over the Snowden Republicans.” That makes Rand Paul the leader of the “Snowden Republicans”. It also puts Snowden near the center of the battle for the, uh, ‘heart and soul‘ of the GOP:

PoliticoGOP hawks: This will not stand, Rand

By ALEXANDER BURNS | 7/26/13 3:34 PM EDT

The Republican Party’s hawks are finally saying it out in the open: This aggression will not stand, Rand.

After three years of watching the GOP’s non-interventionist wing gather strength, there are mounting signs that a more combative set of national security conservatives have reached their breaking point. Now, prominent conservative leaders in what used to be considered the Bush-Cheney mold are increasingly taking the offensive against their intra-party rivals.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie publicly challenged libertarian Republicans Thursday to explain their skepticism about government surveillance to the families of 9/11 victims, declaring at a Republican Governors Association event: “I want them to come to New Jersey and sit across from the widows and the orphans and have that conversation.”

New York Rep. Peter King said this week that he will explore a 2016 presidential run to wrest control of the defense debate from small-government advocates such as Sens. Rand Paul of Kentucky and Ted Cruz of Texas, and warned that an America-first candidate would stand little chance of defeating Hillary Clinton.

Perhaps the most dramatic provocation to Paul-aligned conservatives came earlier this month, when Republican national security activist Liz Cheney – the former vice president’s daughter – announced a primary challenge to Wyoming Sen. Mike Enzi, a low-key incumbent backed by Paul and a number of other Senate colleagues.

Republican hawks say these developments amount to something less than a coordinated counteroffensive. But no one disputes that they’re nearing a critical mass of impatience with what some call “Rand-ism” – resistance to foreign entanglements and deep, confrontational skepticism about the expansion of the federal defense apparatus, particularly in the areas of surveillance and drone warfare.

“I want a strong national defense and I don’t want Rand Paul to be the face of the Republican Party,” King said in an interview. “I’ve felt this way for a while [and] once it gets out there, people say, ‘God, this is wrong, we’re killing ourselves. This is not the Republican Party.’”

Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, who was a vocal and at times caustic critic of Rand Paul’s father, former Texas Rep. Ron Paul, during the 2012 primaries, called it a welcome development that “people are starting to push back.”

“There was a lot of talk, particularly during the Republican primary last year, of, ‘Well, we don’t want to alienate these voters,” Santorum said, recalling that he’d been criticized as “too bellicose” and “too warlike. “I can tell you, the Paulistas who were active on the state level in 2012 were not interested in the Republican Party as it now exists. They are interested in a very different kind of model.”
…

Notice how the GOP is branding “Rand-ism” as a hippy peacenik alternative to that harsh neoconservative flavor of conservatism that Americans are now more than familiar with after decades of Rand-ish economic policies coupled with a “neocon“-influenced foreign policy. Rand Paul represents a kinder, gentler GOP (the kind Jack Hunter highlighted back in 2011). The GOP just has to drop the neocon foreign-policy and domestic surveillance agenda – while maintaining the Orwellian/Rand Paulian economic regime – to give the public a sense that this is a GOP that cares about you. And Rand does sort of represents a kinder, gentler GOP, from a “war, civil-rights, and police-state” standpoint (at least, uh, in theory). And he sort of doesn’t represents a kinder, gentler GOP, from a “day-to-day living for poor and middle-class Americans”-standpoint. By latching on to NSA surveillance as a GOP ‘heart and soul’ wedge issue this intra-party fight could end up branding the Libertarian wing of the GOP as pro-“civil liberties” instead of pro-“gimmicky economic death-trap“. “Rand-ism” is supposed to be a “very different kind of model” . LOL. Pretty slick.

Continuing…

…
King acknowledged that public opinion has turned against some Bush-era security policies, such as the ongoing war in Afghanistan. But he suggested that it doevfin’t take much to jolt voters from their sense of complacency.

“I see every time there’s a terror attack, or even a thwarted terror attack, people’s views change dramatically,” the Long Island lawmaker said, conceding: “They want out after 12 years in Afghanistan, and really after President Obama not explaining for the last five years why we’re there.”

For the emboldened phalanx of defense-minded conservatives, it remains to be seen how difficult a task they’ll have in turning the tide of the GOP’s national security conversation. Republican hawks say they are firmly confident that the party is, in its heart, more sympathetic to the George W. Bush agenda of expanding freedom and fighting terrorism, than to the Rand-style focus on limiting the government’s security powers that many congressional Republicans have recently embraced.

That’s certainly true of most national Republican elites. In some Republican donor and operative circles, there’s active talk of whether the GOP’s strong-on-defense wing may need new infrastructure and organizations to promote their priorities during primary season in 2014 and beyond.

Among those groups, optimistic Republicans argue that the GOP base cheers for tirades against drones and the NSA out of hostility toward the Obama administration, rather than the actual substance of those issues. They point out that the GOP-held House defeated an amendment this week offered by libertarian Rep. Justin Amash, which would have sharply curtailed the NSA’s domestic spying powers (though about two in five Republicans supported the measure.)

Amid the continuing Edward Snowden saga, there have been few Republican voices sympathetic to the NSA leaker outside the Paul family.

Paul, for all the flak he’s taking inside the party, has ridden this shift in public opinion to national prominence, mounting a 13-hour filibuster against the (hypothetical) domestic use of drones against U.S. citizens. Just last week, he delivered a speech at the Veterans of Foreign Wars Convention in Louisville, denouncing foreign aid programs that support Egypt and Pakistan, and arguing against arming rebels in Syria.

“America has never backed down from a fight, but we should never be a nation that is eager to get involved in civil wars that don’t affect our national security,” Paul said, according to his prepared remarks. “America’s mission should always be to keep the peace, not police the world.”

Paul’s gang shows no signs of backing down in the face of renewed criticism from inside the GOP. The Kentuckian was attacked for having “strange ideas” on national security during his 2010 Senate primary, and ended up crushing an opponent endorsed by Dick Cheney. The senator and his advisers are well aware of the response he gets outside of Washington to his come-home-America pitch on national security.

In their view, all the elite dismay at Paul’s views on everything from foreign aid to government surveillance, only underscores the potency of his small-government populism.

But Paul and his allies are also acutely aware that the heat on the senator has increased. Earlier this month, Paul’s world reacted with fury to a report in the Washington Free Beacon – a website founded by multiple Weekly Standard alums – detailing the writings of one Paul adviser, Jack Hunter, who authored provocative, neo-confederate columns under the label “The Southern Avenger.”

In general, Paul’s advisers have taken a bring-it-on approach to the stepped-up confrontation. When Liz Cheney announced for Senate, Paul issued a statement suggesting that she’d be better off seeking office in “her home state of Virginia.”

And after Christie’s shock-and-awe remarks this week, senior Paul adviser Doug Stafford suggested the New Jersey governor “needs to talk to more Americans, because a great number of them are concerned about the dramatic overreach of our government in recent years.” Paul himself fired back at Christie on Twitter, writing: “Christie worries about the dangers of freedom. I worry about the danger of losing that freedom. Spying without warrants is unconstitutional.”

“We are winning. They are lashing out,” one Paul adviser said in an email, of the national security debate.

Rove actually made the remarks at the Aspen Ideas Festival in late June, but journalist Andrew Kirell tweeted out the video Monday. It was subsequently picked by a libertarian blog and local media in Michigan.

Amash indirectly replied on Twitter that an OpenCongress.org scoresheet showed he was the House Republican who votes least often with Pelosi.

The second-term Michigan Republican was one of three House members to receive a 100 percent rating from the conservative Club for Growth in 2012. Heritage Action also rated him as one of the most conservative members of Congress during his first term.

But the Washington magazine National Journal rated Amash the fifth most liberal Republican, in part because he was the House Republican who voted least often with his party.

Amash was also removed from the House Budget Committee after voting against a Republican budget proposal on the grounds that it did not cut spending or reach balance quickly enough.

This is so dangerous! People forget that Hitler in his time was a popular leader, not unlike Ron and Rand Paul. Someone who gave “voice” to the people. Bush totally destroyed people’s trust in the Republican party and now with this Snowden affair plus the IRS and Benghazi scandals, people are totally losing their trust in the Democratic party as well. If Hillary, Jeb Bush and Rand Paul were to run for president it would not be a stretch of the imagination to think Rand Paul just might win the following elections simply because Americans have become disillusioned with the two party system. They might think a break with the old system is just what the US needs, not unlike the Germans thought Hitler was what Germany needed at the time.

Fascism is like a cancer, it keeps cropping up time and again. However, I can’t help but admire their intelligence and ability to strategize.

I at first had my doubts when you said the Snowden affair was a direct assault on the Obama administration but now that I step back and see the big picture it all makes sense. Destroy the GOP, destroy the Democratic party and then people will go running straight into the new führer’s arms. Geez!… That’s why you’re always on the money. Only somebody who has been following their agenda since the 70’s can see the stratagem.

I believe many of the so called “conspiracy theorists”, who by the way are big Ron Paul supporters, are not purposely trying to deceive. It’s just that it all started for them on 911 and when you arrive so late in the game it is extreme easy to fall for the feints and fakes.

Here’s some more info on Snowden’s background. According to his dad, Edward grew up in a patriotic home surrounded by federal agents and police officers. He doesn’t know what made his son decide to do what he did, but the 2010 self-immolation by a Tunisian street vender that became a catalyzing event for the Arab Spring was apparently part of his ‘growing political awareness’. In addition, Lon Snowden suggested that misleading statements of US officials about the surveillance methods Snowden revealed were part of it, saying “If you could say there was a tipping point, I would say it was what happened in the last six to nine months of this nation”. Since Snowden started down this path back in January, the misleading statements by intelligence officials couldn’t be refrerring to DCI James Clapper’s congressional testimony back in March so it would be interesting to learn more about those other intelligence-related public statements pre-January that inspired Snowden (was it Benghazi-related perhaps?…that didn’t involve surveillance methods but who knows how it could have impacted him). Cooperation between Lon Snowden and the FBI also appears to have collapsed:

Washington PostEffort to get NSA leaker Edward Snowden’s father to Moscow collapses
By Jerry Markon, Published: July 30

The FBI tried to enlist the father of National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden to fly to Moscow to try to persuade his son to return to the United States, but the effort collapsed when agents could not establish a way for the two to speak once he arrived, Snowden’s father said Tuesday.

“I said, ‘I want to be able to speak with my son. … Can you set up communications?’ And it was, ‘Well, we’re not sure,’?” Lon Snowden told The Washington Post. “I said, ‘Wait a minute, folks, I’m not going to sit on the tarmac to be an emotional tool for you.’?”

In a wide-ranging interview, the elder Snowden offered a vehement defense of the young man some have labeled a traitor. He said that Edward, who is holed up at an airport in Moscow, grew up in a patriotic family in suburban Maryland, filled with federal agents and police officers, and that he “loves this nation.’’

Asked what triggered his son’s decision to leak top-secret intelligence documents, Snowden, a retired Coast Guard officer, said he didn’t know. Although Edward had seemed troubled in April during their final dinner together, he said his son had recently put up a “firewall between himself and his family.”

“We had no idea what was coming,’’ he said.

But he pointed to a possible explanation: what he considers misleading statements by U.S. officials about the surveillance methods that Edward Snowden revealed. “If you could say there was a tipping point, I would say it was what happened in the last six to nine months of this nation,” the elder Snowden said.

He also mentioned a conversation that hinted at his son’s growing political awareness; he said Edward told him that he was “troubled” by the 2010 suicide of a Tunisian street vendor that helped trigger the Arab Spring protests.

“It was the idea that a man who simply wanted to make a living, who sold fruits and vegetables to support himself and his family, felt so suppressed and humiliated by his government that he would set himself on fire,” Lon Snowden said.

The younger Snowden, 30, has remained a figure of intrigue since he revealed his identity last month as the principal source behind articles in the British newspaper the Guardian and The Post about secret surveillance. Under the programs he exposed, the NSA collects the telephone records of millions of Americans from U.S. telecommunications companies and the online communications of foreign targets from major Internet firms.

Snowden, who has been charged in the United States with theft and espionage, is seeking asylum in Russia. U.S. officials have condemned the leaks and said the programs he exposed are legal and supervised by a federal court.

In the elder Snowden’s first newspaper interview, conducted with his attorney, Bruce Fein, he offered insight into his son, whose own girlfriend labeled him a “man of mystery.’’ Snowden, who is divorced from Edward’s mother, said his son was “a gentle child” who was highly intelligent and fascinated by computers and technology but didn’t always do well in school.

Yet he grew animated when asked why Edward left Arundel High School halfway through the 10th grade. “If people are going to call him a high school dropout, they should call him a 16-year-old college drop-in as well,’’ he said, explaining that Edward missed months of school because he contracted mononucleosis and made up the coursework at a community college.

He added that his son, a voracious reader, once smiled at him, quoted Mark Twain and said, “Dad, my education is interfering with my learning.’ ’’

Snowden said he was unsurprised that the adult Edward later made the remarkable leap from security guard at a federally funded center at the University of Maryland to the intelligence world. “I’m assuming that what they saw was a 23-year-old brilliant man. Someone saw something in him,” said Snowden, 52.

But Snowden said he was shocked when his son was identified as the leaker.

“I was as surprised as the rest of America. I was stunned,” he said. He said he saw no direct signs of the growing disillusionment with the government and its surveillance methods that Edward has spoken about in interviews. “He simply did not talk about his work. He was true to the culture,’’ Snowden said.

Edward has said he took his final government contracting job with Booz Allen Hamilton in Hawaii to gain access to sensitive NSA information. But his father said Edward told him that his previous contracting job had been eliminated because of the federal budget sequestration.

“As a father, it pains me what he did,’’ Snowden said. “I wish my son could have simply sat in Hawaii and taken the big paycheck, lived with his beautiful girlfriend and enjoyed paradise. But as an American citizen, I am absolutely thankful for what he did.’’

Less than two days after Edward’s unmasking, FBI agents showed up at his father’s home outside Allentown, Pa., where he retired from the Coast Guard in 2009. He spoke to them for four hours, telling them “everything I could possibly think of’’ and sharing e-mails he had exchanged with Edward, he said.

Soon after that, the FBI asked him to fly to Moscow.

It is not precisely clear why the negotiations over the trip failed, and FBI officials declined to comment. Nor is it clear why Lon Snowden has not gone to Moscow on his own.

“Sure, I could get on a flight tomorrow to Russia. I’m not sure if I could get access to Edward,’’ said Snowden, who said he had communicated with his son through unspecified “intermediaries” as recently as two days ago.

What is clear is that relations between Lon Snowden and U.S. officials have since deteriorated. He condemned the Obama administration and members of Congress for labeling his son a traitor and said he now prefers that Edward stay in Russia.

Yes, indeed! Thanks so much for your attention to this website and your kind remarks!

By way of underscoring this whole, very complicated and depressing affair:

This is not only an assault on Obama, but on the U.S. economy and, eventually, the world.

That’s complicated. I will be discussing soon the EU’s attempt at establishing its own drone force, internet surveillance security body, and military capability.

All of this because of Snowden!

A few points: Snowden’s a spook, he’s a goddamn spy, not a boy scout or a member of the 4H Club.

Spy rhymes with “lie.” Never lose sight of that.

His public persona is as though he were some kind of rock star: “Eddie the Friendly Spook: The Privacy and Civil Liberties World Tour.”

First stop on the tour: China, that world famous bastion of civil liberties and internet freedom, JUST as Obama was preparing to meet with President Xi.

Eddie the Friendly Spook discloses info about U.S. hacking of Chinese computer systems, thereby damaging Obama’s foreign diplomacy and U.S. relations with China.

Just before Obama is to meet with Angela Merkel, Snowden’s leaking journalist of choice–Nazi fellow traveler Glenn Greenwald–publishes information about U.S. spying on Germany, damaging relations with EU/Germany.

Then Eddie the Friendly Spook’s Privacy and Civil Liberties World Tour heads to another world renowned bastion of civil liberties and internet freedom–Russia!

This just AFTER Obama meets with Putin and before the G20 conference and a proposed summit conference with Putin.

Well this is interesting: Following a chat session between Lon and Ed Snowden, Lon’s legal team, led by Bruce Fein, just voiced the concerns Lon has about the intentions of Greenwald and Assange. And they even threatened to cut off media access to any media outlet that agreed to an alleged exclusive interview with Glenn Greenwald. So Lon Snowden’s earlier concerns about the intentions of the people surrounding his son appears to have grown:

The Wall Street JournalDivisions Widen Among Snowden’s Supporters
Edward Snowden and His Father Spoke for the First Time Since Late May
Updated August 15, 2013, 3:27 p.m. ET

By LUKAS I. ALPERT

MOSCOW—Former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden and his father spoke for the first time since late May early Thursday, going against the wishes of their lawyers and reflecting growing rifts among family and advisers of the fugitive leaker of U.S. surveillance documents.

…

Mr. Snowden and his father, Lon Snowden, spoke for about two hours via an encrypted Internet chat program, said two lawyers who helped arrange the contact. The elder Mr. Snowden participated in the chat from the Washington, D.C., office of his attorney, Bruce Fein, and was connected to his son with the help of Ben Wizner, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, who is involved in coordinating Mr. Snowden’s legal defense in the U.S. What they discussed wasn’t disclosed.

…

More fractious is the relationship among Lon Snowden, WikiLeaks and Mr. Greenwald. Mr. Fein’s wife and spokeswoman, Mattie Fein, said Lon Snowden’s legal team doesn’t trust the intentions of Mr. Greenwald or WikiLeaks and worry they are giving Edward Snowden bad advice.

“The thing we have been most concerned about is that the people who have influence over Ed will try to use him for their own means,” Ms. Fein said. “These guys have their own agenda here and we aren’t so sure that it has Ed’s best interest in mind.”

Mr. Greenwald called the Feins’ concerns ridiculous and said they had no standing in the matter as they have never had direct contact with Mr. Snowden.

“They have no connection to Ed,” Mr. Greenwald said. “Snowden is not 14 years old. He is a very strong-willed, independent, autonomous adult and is making all his own choices about who he deals with and who represents him.”

Ms. Fein said she was only voicing the concerns of Mr. Snowden’s father, who wanted to make sure his son ended up with the best available legal defense and worried that the team being put together was focused on promoting the interests of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

On Aug. 9, WikiLeaks started a “Journalistic Source Protection Defence Fund,” to raise money for Mr. Snowden, saying he had endorsed it. So far, the fund has raised $12,011, according to WikiLeaks’ website.

WikiLeaks also recently began selling Edward Snowden merchandise, including T-shirts and coffee mugs, via its online store. WikiLeaks didn’t respond to questions about the fund or allegations made by with Lon Snowden’s legal team.

On Sunday, Ms. Fein says she was called by a producer at a U.S. television network she didn’t specify saying Mr. Greenwald had been shopping around an exclusive interview with Mr. Snowden for seven figures.

She said she warned the producer that she would cut off access to Mr. Snowden’s father, who has appeared regularly on television, to anyone who agreed to Mr. Greenwald’s terms. A few hours later, she said she received a furious email from Mr. Greenwald, calling her a liar and denying he had made such an offer.

Mr. Greenwald calls the accusation that he was shopping an interview “defamatory,” but did admit to having informal discussions with NBC about producing an interview he would conduct himself and licensing it to them for $50,000.

“There were no negotiations. I didn’t shop anything around. I didn’t go to NBC, they called me and asked and made these offers,” he said. “By the time we paid the crew and got ourselves to Moscow and stayed there for two-three days, we would end up losing money, or maybe breaking even.”

A spokeswoman for NBC didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

He said he decided against the idea because it would distract from the public discussion about surveillance and privacy that has emerged since Mr. Snowden leaked details of the U.S. programs.

Edward Snowden: My father and his legal team do not speak for me
By CNN Staff
updated 11:04 PM EDT, Thu August 15, 2013

(CNN) — The man wanted by the United States for leaking details of National Security Agency intelligence gathering says journalists have been misled into printing false claims about his legal situation, The Huffington Post reported Thursday.

In an e-mailed statement to the news organization, Edward Snowden distanced himself from his father, Lon Snowden; his father’s attorney, Bruce Fein; and Fein’s associates, saying “they do not possess any special knowledge regarding my situation.”

“None of them have been or are involved in my current situation, and this will not change in the future,” the statement said.

“I ask journalists to understand that they do not possess any special knowledge regarding my situation or future plans, and not to exploit the tragic vacuum of my father’s emotional compromise for the sake of tabloid news.”

The statement was released the same day The Wall Street Journal reported that Lon Snowden’s legal team does not trust his son’s closest advisers: WikiLeaks and Guardian reporter Glenn Greenwald.

“I would like to correct the record: I’ve been fortunate to have legal advice from an international team of some of the finest lawyers in the world, and to work with journalists whose integrity and courage are beyond question,” Snowden said in the statement.

One of the most fascinating aspects of the transition from the 2012 presidential campaign to the post-November political alignment is the seamless manner in which Kentucky Senator Rand Paul assumed the leadership of the libertarian movement from his father Ron. The elder Paul was a perennial presidential candidate as well as a Texas congressman. Last year marked his last futile run for the White House and he also decided not to run for reelection, formally ending his political career and informally passing the torch to his son. While Ron was widely regarded as something of a crank because of his extreme views about the Federal Reserve and foreign policy, albeit one with an impassioned following, Rand is a very different sort of politician. Though no less committed to libertarian ideology than his father, Rand has been careful to position himself within the mainstream on most issues and that strategy has paid off handsomely for him: two and a half years into his Senate career, he has become one of the darlings of the Republican base and a probable first-tier candidate for the GOP presidential nomination in 2016.

That is something his father could never have dreamed of achieving. It is far from clear that Rand can make the next leap from a factional leader to someone who could actually win the nomination and make a credible challenge for the White House. But there is no comparison between Ron’s crazy-uncle-in-the-attic image and the niche that Rand has carved out for himself in the center ring of the American political circus. The ease with which he has bridged the gap between the libertarian fringe and the Republican mainstream has been impressive. But one of the things that made it possible was Ron’s absence from the political stage. The question for Rand and his followers is whether that will continue and if the political baggage of his father’s extremism will start to handicap what must be considered a very realistic shot at winning the GOP nod in 2016.

But unfortunately for his son, the elder Paul has not retired from public life, meaning that his statements and associations are bound to raise awkward questions for his son. A prime example of this is provided by the Washington Free Beacon, which yesterday reported that Ron Paul will be a featured speaker at a conference run by a group with a record of anti-Semitism.

As the Beacon notes:

Former congressman and presidential candidate Ron Paul is scheduled to give a Sept. 11 keynote address at a conference sponsored by an anti-Semitic organization, the Southern Poverty Law Center reports.

Also slated to speak at the conference is the president of the John Birch Society, a fringe conspiracy-theorist group that was famously denounced by the late William F. Buckley. …

The Fatima Center’s publications have published columns criticizing the Pope for “kowtowing” to the “Synagogue of Satan,” argued that Jews are attempting to undermine the Catholic Church on behalf of Satan, and claiming that “Zionist billionaires” have been “financially raping” the Russian people. The organization also promotes New World Order conspiracy theories.

SPLC reports that the group’s leader, Father Nicholas Gruner, has attended Holocaust denial conferences. Gruner will speak prior to Paul at the Fatima conference, according to the posted schedule.

As the Beacon also notes, Ron Paul came under fire for publishing newsletters in the 1980s and ’90s with blatantly racist and anti-Semitic material, although he later claimed he wasn’t responsible for the content. If the denials rang false, it was because Paul has always seemed comfortable with the world of conspiracy theories that dovetailed with many of his positions on domestic and foreign issues that resonated in the fever swamps of the far right and left.

Should Rand be held accountable for his father’s views? In the abstract, the answer to that must be no. Rand Paul is entitled to live his own life and must be held responsible for what he does and says, not what his relatives do.

But Ron Paul is not the moral equivalent of the proverbial black sheep younger brother that sometimes pops up in our political history to bedevil the more responsible figures in a prominent family, such as Billy Carter. Given that Rand always supported his father’s campaigns and that his own positions are rooted in the same core beliefs as that of the elder Paul, asking where one man’s position begins and the other’s ends has always been a reasonable query. It will be even more important once Rand starts a presidential campaign that aims for something more than the occasional good showing in a caucus that Ron aimed at. At that point, he is going to have to come to terms with the fact that, like every other realistic presidential candidate, he must either endorse or disassociate himself from controversial statements and actions of those close to him.

Since entering the Senate, this is something that Rand has steadfastly refused to do. To date he has been able to keep some distance between his father’s wingnut pronouncements about the government and foreign policy (which bear a close resemblance to those embraced by the far left) while upholding his own libertarian stands. He has never condemned his father, but he has tried to make it clear that he has his own views. But once he enters the pre-2016 fray as a realistic contender that won’t be possible. Ron Paul will either have to cease and desist his extremist statements and associations or Rand will have to start giving him the same treatment Barack Obama gave Rev. Jeremiah Wright. The analogy in which a politician is asked how a longtime mentor and friend impacted his beliefs is quite apt. If Rand doesn’t back away from his father he will soon find that a media that will be out to get him (in contrast to their refusal to hold Obama accountable), as well as a suspicious Republican electorate that wants nothing to do with that sort of extremism, will sink an otherwise viable presidential run.

In a heated September 5th interview with MSNBC’s Alex Wagner, Former U.S. Congressman Ron Paul, who is currently surfing a wave of mainstream media appearances due to his strong criticism of the push from the Obama Administration for U.S. military intervention in Syria, defended his planned September 11th, 2013 keynote address at a “gala dinner fundraiser” to be held during a controversial [also see 1, 2] conference organized by a fringe, schismatic Catholic organization accused of virulent anti-Semitism, the Fatima Center.

According to a new report, Ron Paul’s association with Fatima Center leaders, including Fatima Center head Father Nicholas Gruner — who has espoused Holocaust denial, traces back at least as far as 1998.

During the September 5th interview, MSNBC’s Wagner confronted Paul with the fact that the Fatima Center has been called a “hard-core anti-Semite group” and has in the past published writing suggesting that Jews should be stripped of certain civil rights — a suggestion also once made by one of the speakers, Father Paul Leonard Kramer, who will join Ron Paul at the upcoming Fatima Center “Path To Peace” conference to be held September 8th to 13th in Niagara Falls, Ontario.

Former Congressman Paul responded to MSNBC correspondent Wagner’s challenge by flatly refusing to reconsider his planned appearance at the Fatima Center conference and by accusing Wagner of “Catholic bashing.”

Also joining Former Congressman Ron Paul (R-TX) at the event will be speakers who have promoted Holocaust denial and portrayed global warming as a hoax that will be used to justify a Jewish and Israeli-led genocide of most of the Earth’s population, and who reject the long-established scientific fact that the Earth orbits the Sun.

Fatima Center head Father Nicholas Gruner, and other top leaders associated with the center, have for over two decades promoted claims that a global conspiracy of wealthy “apostate Jews” and Freemasons — who are alleged to have financed Hitler and the Nazis and hold a “Hitler-like doctrine of exterminating the gentile races and repopulating the Earth with their own kind” — is plotting to institute a “New World Order” global government under the command of the anti-Christ.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks far-right, racist and anti-Semitic groups, identifies the Fatima Center as part of the “‘radical traditionalist Catholic’ movement, [which is] perhaps the single largest group of hard-core anti-Semites in North America.”

That SPLC characterization was based in part, on the organization’s landmark 2006 report, by SPLC researcher Heidi Beirich, Radical Traditionalist Catholics Spew Anti-Semitic Hate, Commit Violence Against Jews, which was careful to note that such “Radical Traditionalist” Catholic groups deviate substantially from official Catholic Church teachings, positions, and doctrine, and can be considered a fringe tendency within the stream of orthodox and Traditionalist Catholic groups as well.

Gruner, a defrocked Catholic priest who has repeatedly portrayed the Vatican as at least partly controlled by the alleged satanic conspiracy, recently went on record suggesting that the commonly-accepted Jewish death toll in the Holocaust had been substantially inflated. As Father Gruner explained to the Washington Free Beacon:

Are we talking about the six million Jews that are alleged to been killed by Hitler? A question that nobody has been able to answer for me, is how can you have six million die, and have 13 million left, when you only had 13 million to start with? I think it’s impossible. But you know, I’m open-minded. I’ll listen to somebody who can prove it otherwise.

Father Gruner is not the only Holocaust denier scheduled to speak at the upcoming Fatima Center along with Ron Paul. Another is Catholic lawyer Robert Sungenis — who has been identified by the Southern Poverty Law Center as “one of the most rabid and open antisemites in the entire radical traditionalist movement.”

In a document posted in 2011 on his personal website, Robert Sungenis wrote, echoing Gruner:

What I question is whether 6 million Jews were killed by the Nazis. I simply find that figure hard to believe, not only because the then current records show that the worldwide Jewish population in 1948 was virtually the same as it was in 1940, but also because there is easily obtainable documented evidence that only a few hundred thousand Jews lost their lives in Nazi internment camps.

According to the Jewish Chronicle, Sungenis has also stated:

The statistics show us that there was no large difference between the number of Jews living in 1939 as there were living in 1948, so how could six million Jews have died between those two periods?

In June 2011, Sungenis’ views on the Holocaust led to a last-minute cancellation of a UK Orthodox Catholic conference scheduled to be held at Westminster Hall. Sungenis and Father Paul Kramer had been invited to speak at the event.

Also in 2011, Father Gruner’s Fatima Center published an op-ed in defense of Catholic traditionalist Bishop Richard Williamson, of the Society of St. Pius X, who was then on trial, in German court, for a statement he had made during an interview on Swedish television:

I believe that the historical evidence, the historical evidence is strongly against, is, is, hugely against, six million Jews having been deliberately gassed in gas chambers as a deliberate policy of Adolf Hitler.

In the March 28, 2011 Fatima Center op-ed, author Edwin Faust stated that “there is a paucity of physical evidence” concerning the Nazi use of gas chambers and went on, “Most accounts of the gas chambers at concentration camps are anecdotal.”

Faust then described Bishop Williamson’s reliance on the so-called “Leuchter Report”, a pseudo-scientific study conducted by the American Fred Leuchter, who had established a career in designing and building execution system used by states with capital punishment.

Although discredited, the 1988 Leuchter Report — which is celebrated in Holocaust denial circles — purported to disprove Nazi mass-gassing of prisoners at the Auschwitz death camp. Leuchter had little or no engineering or scientific training relevant for making such an assessment.

Faust’s Fatima Center op-ed reserved judgment on the validity of the Leuchter Report, but went on to portray Bishop Williamson, Fred Leuchter, and noted Holocaust denialist Ernst Zundel as victims of persecution who “discovered that it is dangerous to speak freely about certain things”.

While recent scholarship has shed light on the moral complicity of the Catholic Church in helping stoke anti-Semitism and for failing to publicly speak out against Nazi persecution and extermination of Europe’s Jews, the Vatican nonetheless acknowledges that Hitler and the Nazis killed roughly six million Jews and has formally apologized for its inaction.

Holocaust denialism is not the only crank theory promoted by Fatima Center leaders.

In an April 2011 broadcast of the Center’s “Fatima Today” show, Nicholas Gruner and Father Paul Leonard Kramer, who works closely with and often makes public appearances with Gruner, discussed their belief that global climate change is a hoax, perpetrated by members of the alleged global Jewish Freemasonry conspiracy — which they suggested includes Henry Kissinger, Former U.S. President George H.W. Bush, Former Vice President Al Gore, and Former U.S.S.R. head Mikhail Gorbachev — to justify the killing of up to six billion people by, according to Gruner, “starvation or by guns or by gas chambers or by whatever.”

Speakers slated for the upcoming Fatima Center conference go further still. Two speakers joining Ron Paul at the event are Catholic lawyers Robert Sungenis and John Salza, who are in the Catholic vanguard of a movement of “geocentrists” who reject the heliocentric model of the Solar System (that was accepted by the Roman Catholic Church centuries ago) and maintain that the Sun and all the celestial objects in the heavens rotate around the Earth once per 24-hour period.

In 2010, Sungenis and Salza could be found, along with several of their Protestant geocentrist counterparts, at the First Annual Catholic Conference on Geocentrism, held at the Hilton Garden Inn in South Bend, Indiana. Sungenis is author of the book (and website by the same name) “Galileo Was Wrong.”

As researcher Rachel Tabachnick described in an August 23, 2013 report on the upcoming Fatima Center conference in Niagara, ON, the original roster of speakers scheduled to join Former Congressman Paul at the event also included professed neofascist Italian politician Roberto Fiore, various far-right American radical Catholic traditionalists associated with the Fatima Center who have also promoted anti-Jewish variants of “New World Order” conspiracy theory, and the President of the John Birch Society John McManus.

Another notable event speaker will be Father Karl Stehlin, Society of St. Paul X District Supervisor of Eastern Europe, who in 1998 stoked a controversy concerning Christian crosses placed in a field bordering on the former Nazi concentration camp of Auschwitz. In defiance of Catholic authorities, Stehlin blessed crosses placed at the site by Polish citizens who promoted the view that “Jews controlled the government and the church.”

In addition, speaking at the event will be Barbara Skurnowicz, President of the Michigan group Healthcare Professionals For Vaccine Choice — a group which fights against mandatory vaccination and promotes the claim, generally considered to have been disproved, that certain vaccines can trigger autism in children.

The Fatima Center “Path To Peace” conference will not be the first time that Ron Paul has collaborated with leaders from the Fatima Center and the John Birch Society, in promoting “New World Order” conspiracy theory, according to new findings from researcher Rachel Tabachnick.

In 1998, five of the leaders scheduled to speak at the upcoming “Path To Peace” conference, including Father Nicholas Gruner, appeared in the John Birch Society-produced 30-minute conspiracy video “The United Nations: A Look Into The Future”, which promoted a United States withdrawal from the United Nations. Playing a starring role in the video was Ron Paul. Reports Tabachnick:

Scenes in the JBS film change to black and white when United Nations bullies in dark sunglasses come to snatch children from their homes and force them to go to public schools. Depictions of the United Nations’ infiltration are interspersed with images invoking Nazi Germany.

Nor is it Paul’s first brush with hate groups or hate speech. In 2008, during his first presidential bid, Congressman Ron Paul came under heavy criticism due to anti-Semitic and racist newletters published in his name in 1990s.

DALLAS — It’s 7 a.m. on a Saturday, Rand Paul is exhausted and airport security has just confiscated his morning joe.

“The TSA took away my coffee,” the libertarian-leaning senator, Houston-bound for a day of events with GOP activists, complains of the federal agency he’s proposed abolishing. “I offered to drink it to show it wasn’t a bomb.”

The Kentucky Republican has many more sleep-deprived moments in store as he prepares for a near-certain 2016 presidential bid. On an early February political swing through his native Texas, where Paul was joined by a POLITICO reporter, the contradictions and challenges that would define such a run were on vivid display — as was Paul’s belief that his blend of libertarian-infused conservatism could forge an entirely new path to the White House.

In an extensive in-flight interview, the first-term senator outlined his vision for a more inclusive GOP — only to meet a frosty response hours later when he spoke favorably about immigration to a roomful of people enamored of the tea party’s luminary of the moment, Sen. Ted Cruz.

Paul didn’t talk much during the trip about his roots as the son of an ex-congressman and libertarian folk hero. But Texans at every turn brought up his father, the highly polarizing former Rep. Ron Paul, from whom Rand Paul knows he must stake out a separate identity to have any shot at the GOP nomination.

And as Paul argued that the GOP needs a 2016 standard-bearer with broader appeal than its recent nominees, Mitt Romney and John McCain, he did not evince Barack Obama’s ability to move a crowd, George W. Bush’s everyman relatability or Bill Clinton’s love of the game.

At the same time, Paul made clear his ambition to remake the Republican Party by drawing support from constituencies that have voted reliably Democratic. Just as Ronald Reagan drew working-class Democrats into the GOP fold and Bill Clinton pulled his party to the political center, Paul has a vision of that magnitude in mind for his party.

“The country’s a mess, and I think there needs to be a program that Republicans put forward, and also there needs to be a messenger who can actually win,” Paul said, in perhaps his most overt remarks to date about what a presidential bid would look like. “And I’m concerned that if we put forward the same sort of candidate again, that we won’t be successful.”

Sporting a gray suit, red tie and cowboy boots, Paul said ideas that fall into the “libertarian-slash-Republican” camp “are a bit different from what we’ve done in the past” and could expand the GOP tent. Those proposals go beyond his well-known problems with National Security Agency surveillance, which led him to file a class-action lawsuit against the agency last week. Drug policy reforms, Paul said, would particularly resonate in minority communities that have largely shut out Republicans.

And opposing indefinite detention of detainees, he said, would strike a chord with groups that historically have been persecuted.

“I think that our message … has great appeal if you are part of any kind of group that’s ever been mistreated in history,” he said. “That could be African-Americans, Jewish-Americans, Japanese-Americans, all of which, at times in our history, haven’t been treated as they should be.”

Paul rode the tea party wave to an upset win in 2010, and he developed a reputation during his first few years in the Senate as a persistent thorn in the side of GOP leaders. But over the past several months, while his policy positions haven’t shifted much, he has refrained from leading the rhetorical charge against establishment figures in his own party. A case in point: It was Cruz who spearheaded the fight that led to the government shutdown, while Paul largely kept his head down and even invited Democrats to a coffee summit to smooth things over.

Paul has also made a point to visit minority communities and has been among the most aggressive in his party about promoting outreach to nontraditional GOP voting blocs.